A defect in Dempster-Shafer theory

Authors:
Pei Wang
Affiliations:
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN
Venue:
UAI'94 Proceedings of the Tenth international conference on Uncertainty in artificial intelligence
Year:
1994

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Abstract

By analyzing the relationships among chance, weight of evidence and degree of belief, we show that the assertion "probability functions are special cases of belief functions" and the assertion "Dempster's rule can be used to combine belief functions based on distinct bodies of evidence" together lead to an inconsistency in Dempster-Shafer theory. To solve this problem, we must reject some fundamental postulates of the theory. We introduce a new approach for uncertainty management that shares many intuitive ideas with D-S theory, while avoiding this problem.